FIG. 1 gives an overview over prior art system architecture.
The overall system 1 comprises a remote computer 3 and a local computer 2 with a network connection through network services 4.
A local computer 2 is a system which executes application programs 21 and host access to a file 2511 on a file system 25.
An application program 21 is to be understood as an executable file on the local computer 2 which needs access to files through environment variable definitions. Therefore, it calls so-called environment variable access services 211.
With such prior art technology it is possible to access data from a local file system by an application program running on a local computer. It is also possible to transparently access even data from a remote computer through the local file system management which is mounted to it. So, the present invention addresses all application programs or systems which do not care about network access today and just rely on local data access from their specific point of view.
With the increasing use of the Internet the need to transparently access data beyond the scope of mounted file system arises. If data resides on the Internet or even in the Intranet data is normally not available through such file sharing mechanism for several reasons and can often only be accessed via browser based services using URL locations. This however is disadvantageous because many application programs do not have a Browser functionality incorporated with them.